How Much Effort Should You Put In?
A short guide on how to achieve optimum performance in any given discipline without burning out.
Go pump up a bike tire as the instructions tell you to and kick it. You'll see that it’s not loose and sloppy, and it’s not rigid and about to burst. Instead it has a certain bounce to it. It’s strong but not brittle. it’s not flaccid, and it’s not tense.
Though It’s not exactly relaxed either. It’s agile.
It’s not sitting back comfortably with more to give, it’s operating at it’s peak. Not above and not below. It’s in that sweet spot of sustainable high performance.
Go tune a guitar and feel the tension on the strings. Do you want strings that flap around like rubber bands, or do you want something so tightly strung that simply picking the guitar up causes the strings to snap and lash out at you?
Guitars require a high degree of tension, but just the right amount that beautiful music can be played on them with gusto. No more is necessary, nothing less will suffice.
50/50 isn’t enough. Life gives us too much energy for that. Are you content to be just average at what you were born to do, or do you want to be in the top percentile, where you belong with everyone else in their respective fields?
If that sounds impossible, then hear me out. There are so many different skills out there, and so many unique people with unique interests that should be celebrated and cultivated. If you listen to yourself and follow your authenticity, you will find your niche and excel in it.
There won’t be enough other people out there identical to you to be able to compete with you. Why? because you’re unique and born to find abundance through what you love to do.
That’s the astounding beauty and intelligence at the heart of the universe. All you have to do to align with it is get out of your own way.
If you’re struggling to find the energy, find what’s blocking you and unblock it. In this era, with all of our abundance, The game of life is more about what you don’t do than what you do do.
Fall into what you are, do what you enjoy and do it to the best of your ability with no attachment and no expectations. Simply do it for it’s own sake, to bask in your enjoyment of it and the mastery that that naturally brings.
In this way of being you will become fluid, supple, agile, capable and ultimately, graceful.
Aligning with the universal intelligence will infuse your entire being with a higher intelligence. This intelligence will be highly magnetic and attractive to all other things of high value.
Life is too short for struggling. You were not given willpower so that you can use it to endlessly and joylessly slug yourself up some meaningless hill like some Sisyphean nightmare. That’s nihilism, and it feels bad and wrong because it isn’t the truth. Things operate far more intelligently than that. This is the sacred truth hidden within the teachings of our ancient spiritual heritage.
Don’t think that your human intellect can outmatch the primordial intelligence that underlies all things and pick flaws in it. That’s simply egoic, self-defeating, self-punishing hubris.
Let your assumptions go and feel instead of thinking. Then the twinkle in the eye of the universe will manifest itself in your eyes.
The willpower and strength you were given is only there just to tighten up, clean up and polish the finely tuned perfection that you innately are, and have always been destined to be.
It’s not there for you to change yourself away from your true nature and it’s not put there so that you can forcibly torture yourself into conforming to anyone’s expectations, even those of your own little ego self.
You'll find that, paradoxically, when you’re firing on all cylinders and really living your purpose, really giving life your all, you will require very little rest at all.
This is when you'll know that you’ve reached true mastery. Of your occupation, your self, and your life.
